


The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-11 00:06:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4413221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanda understands that the brain and the mind are not the same thing, although she has a difficult time explaining the idea to other people; he may understand, though, because his mind is not like any other she has ever looked into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve wanted to write Scarlet Vision for a while now, and I think inspiration finally struck. (As if I needed another ship to moon over, right? Yeah, I know, I know.) Any and all comments and critiques are very much welcome, and thank you for reading.

…

Somewhere between one intrathecal injection and the next, which is how she must mark time in this place where there are no windows, they present Wanda with a diagram of the human brain. The picture is divided into regions, color-coded, the map to a country engaged in civil war. 

All its labels are blank.

“You know, Miss Maximoff, a mind can be the worst torture chamber imaginable.” The doctor has clean little eyeglasses and the spare, inquisitive face of a rat. “But if you want to teach our enemies that, you need to be well-acquainted with the tools at your disposal.”

Then he holds out a ballpoint pen, because it seems he has decided Wanda will not use it for unpatriotic purposes.

(Not like the last female volunteer, who had woken one morning to discover all her connective tissue changing rapidly to bone – an imperfect shape-shifting ability, everyone concluded, spoiled by a spontaneous mutation in the ACVR1 gene, interesting but useless save for making a few poetic allusions about women turned into stone.

The pen with its needle-fine tip, intended for writing in a daily journal, had been on the bedside table.)

“Miss Maximoff? Do you understand?”

Wanda stares at the man.

She glances at the wall behind him, the one dividing her cell from Pietro’s. White plaster covers three or four fractal-pattern cracks in the cement; one of these gaps had been just large enough to speak through, if she laid down on her side, listening to her brother shake like a greyhound in its gate with the effort to hold himself still.

_(“And the other g-guard,”_  he’d asked,  _“W-w-w-what does he think ab-out?”_

_“American pop music,”_  Wanda had reported.  _“He is terrified the others will catch him singing it out loud and shoot him for being a reactionary.”_ )

A one-way mirror takes up the other wall, but Wanda has spent enough time staring at that already.

She could tell the doctor how this diagram is pointless to her, that the mind and the brain are two different things and that her business is with the former rather than the latter. She could tell him that his own mind is as small and inflexible and free of contour as the inside of a blown egg. She could make his glasses shatter out of their frames.

Instead she remembers a mortar shell, the word  _S-T-A-R-K_  stamped on its side, and accepts the pen between two fingers.

“Da,” Wanda nearly answers, but she should also be learning the language of the enemy now and therefore says in its place, “Yes.”

So: frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, occipital lobe.  Wanda defines them all and records their functions, a creator naming each part as it is summoned out of some primordial chaos. Vai yivra elohim et-ha’adam betzalmov.

_(“But you said God always knows everything,”_  she’d told her mother, once.  _“How does that work, if a person can’t think of more than one thing at a time?”_

Their conversation had begun as a debate about doing arithmetic homework in front of the television. Wanda, being Wanda, had tried raising things to a more philosophical level; Mama, being Mama, had plucked the question from mid-air and set it right back down.

_“The Lord’s mind is not like yours or mine,”_ Mama had said, sticking the pencil into Wanda’s hand. _“It does not have borders. How else do you think He can be here in the present and still see what sort of harm a silly action could do to your future?”_ )

And thus Wanda understands that the mind is not to be found in this rote identification, this conqueror’s division of territory into separate pieces. The mind is a spatial dimension – a place with lefts, and rights, and ups, and downs, and borders. Usually.  

For example:

Tony Stark’s mind is not anything like a machine, grinding gears and indifferent violence, as she has expected all these years that it will be; it is the interior of an astrolabe, with symmetry and precision and the careful attention of hand-made moving parts.

Wanda draws back from this image as if bitten by a snake.

The soldier’s mind is a fortress, best viewed not from within its tunnels or garrisons but from a clean-lined schematic drawing he has attempted to make of it. The false god’s mind is a hollow drum, filled with booming resonance when struck. The assassin’s mind is all triggers and wires and snares, a steel trap, although Wanda cannot decide if this is meant for other people or for the woman herself.

The monster’s mind comes as another surprise.

She anticipates a hard little cage, smaller even than the mirror-sided cell they had used for both her and the disposable failures that preceded her. What she finds in its place is a vast, quiet house, made larger still by sliding panels and turning staircases and a single locked room at its center.

And Pietro’s mind is – was, she must remember, with the impatient clumsiness of someone who has recently lost a limb – Pietro’s mind was a tunnel through the mountains, straight and purposeful and promising safe passage to its travelers, formed so that light could shine all the way through.

Wanda cannot tell what shape her own mind takes. She tries, once, but all she sees is her own reflection in a darkened glass.

…

So she knows, in an instant, that he is different.

He emerges from the cradle (a stupid thing to call it, when it resembles a casket so much more), and invites her to look again – then his mind opens up around her and above her and within her like the dome of a clear night sky. For a moment she feels herself falling upwards into its expansiveness, its clockwork order and deep serenity. She searches for its boundaries and finds none.

Perhaps this should frighten her. Perhaps this should drive her mad, turn her to a pillar of salt or stone, like one who has looked upon the face of God.  

But a god would probably not need to ask so many questions.

“And when you are reading an individual’s mind,” he says, “is there a particular region you must examine? My studies on neuropsychology indicate that it is most likely the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the posterior precuneus, but I’m eager to hear your perspective.”

“No, no,” Wanda tells him. She turns a flat metal disk in her hands, watches the red light curl it up into a sphere. “These are only parts in the brain. They are not what I see.”

“I am afraid I do not understand.”

They sit on a long bench in the new SHEILD facility’s training room, an even and measurable arm’s length apart. The fluorescent lights have been dimmed, the equipment returned to its storage, the mats wiped down. Windows on the room’s far wall show a gray morning sky outside.

Wanda wakes before dawn, most days. There are dreams she would rather not return to – long silver needles, a narrow crack through the cement wall, muscles calcifying into bone. Sometimes she even dreams of her parents and brother, seated around a table set with white cloth and candlesticks as if for the Sabbath, except that in the fluttering light Wanda can see they are all dead.

Well. 

Wandering the hallways is preferable to that, at least.

And, most days, he will walk up beside her, pushed forward onto his toes like a cat so that she does hear him approaching, and they will fall in step together along the silent and well-kept corridors.

_(“I recently discovered a small bag of plums down in the kitchen refrigerator. Would you like to accompany me there? I’ve never tasted one before, but the poem by William Carlos Williams gives me especial expectations.”_

_“Mr. Wilson said something curious to me today. I believe the word ‘dude’ originally referred to a man who dressed in forward fashions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but this doesn’t seem to have been his meaning. What would you make of it? – Have I said something amusing?”_

_“The landscape here is curious, don’t you think? It’s very flat. I’m informed that it was all covered by a shallow inland sea during the Late Cambrian period… Do you miss your home country, Miss Maximoff?”_

At such times Wanda can almost forgive him for saving her – for carrying her into this new, singular life, where she has been left alone with the dark reflection of her own mind and cannot see where to go next.)

Now she turns herself towards him, examining the geometric metal planes that frame his face. What a peculiar color to have for skin. And such improbable eyes: pale and frangible blue, like glass, the eyes of a man.

“Your body,” Wanda finally says. “Which part belongs most to you?”

(Another thing – should he properly be called  _The Vision_ , or  _A Vision_? English and its various articles, its preoccupation with definitiveness of number, has never seemed sensible to her.)

He frowns. “Taking Theseus’s paradox into consideration, I would say all parts are equally my own.”

“But the stone is not yours.” Wanda allows the disk to flatten again. Red light fades off her fingertips as she winds up her magic into a neat spool. “The lightning to wake you was not yours. The voice you speak with was in Stark’s computer first, yes?”

He always stares at everything with a studious, telescopic attention, tracing over features and details as though he will shortly be ordered to turn his back and draw a scene from memory.

The metal feels hot against her palm.

_(“Maybe I am a monster. I don’t think I’d know if I were one. I’m not what you are, and not what you intended.”)_

Then Vision – she will simply call him that, Wanda decides, until something better comes along – nods, slowly.

“And if someone took away any one of these things,” she continues, “you would not be as you are, yet you are not any one of these things by itself, either. The mind and brain are the same way. Can you make sense of this?”

He blinks once, twice.

“I can.” Vision gestures with both hands whenever he talks, another particularly human affectation. “You are saying that the physical and mechanical parts in orchestration with one another manage to create something metaphysical. The brain is not the mind, but it creates the mind. It’s similar to the way in which an instrument creates music – is this a correct interpretation?”

“Ah. More or less.”

He smiles. “That is a very curious and wonderful way of imagining it, Miss Maximoff.”

And Wanda recalls the map again, blank except for its borders and its colors: the occipital lobe for seeing what is immediately in front of you, the temporal lobe for determining the words with which to express it, the parietal lobe for reaching out to touch it, the frontal lobe for deciding what you must do next.

(Then she pictures a night sky, alive with stars, moving in balanced orbit around the fixed point of true north.)

“Thank you,” she tells him. “I like to think so.”

…

_The Brain – is wider than the Sky –_  
For – put them side by side –   
The one the other will contain   
With ease – and You – beside

_The Brain is deeper than the sea –_  
For – hold them – Blue to Blue  
The one the other will absorb   
As Sponges – Buckets – do –

_The Brain is just the weight of God –_  
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –   
And they will differ – if they do –   
As syllable from Sound –

_\- Emily Dickinson_

_…_

**End Notes:**  The Hebrew quoted here (I hope it’s accurate - please tell me if it isn’t) is a part of Genesis 1:27: “And God created man in His image.” 


End file.
